by Penny, Laura
The megachurches and pastorpreneurs that kept Republicans in office by urging their flocks to vote for them ought to pay reparations to sensible voters. Ditto for the Catholics and Mormons who stumped against gay marriage in states such as Maine and California. Yanking their tax-exempt status and slashing Christian corporate welfare would be a good start. It would send a very clear message that those who traduce the separation of Church and State must pay to play politics instead of profiteering from their unholy union. This brings us to …
Political freedom, or the end of authoritarian rule
I won’t bang on at length about politics here, since I’ll be doing that in Chapter Five. But I have to mention one of the most important legacies of the Enlightenment, the one we see in documents such as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which is the idea that liberty is a God-given or natural right. The only acceptable curb on this liberty is the liberty of others. As the French declaration states, “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.”
A king may be able to tamp down the violence and lawlessness and guarantee his subjects a modicum of security and commodious living, but he does so at the cost of the people’s liberty and autonomy, a price that, by the end of the seventeenth century, enlightened people were no longer willing to pay. Locke, for example, argues that “absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted the only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so can be no form of civil government at all.”12 Having a king means living under the rule of Big Dad.
If we are to have a rational polity, a democratic polity, then we must throw off the shackles of hereditary, arbitrary, traditional authority. Popping out of the lucky regal vagina is hardly a guarantee that the heir will know how to run things. Rather, the insular and privileged world of the aristocracy produces too many monarchs who are totally clueless about the concerns of the people. As Paine puts it in Common Sense,
There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy: it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgement is required. The state of a king shuts him from the World, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.13
Fast forward to now. Are our democratic leaders shut from the World? Lord knows they press a lot of vulgar flesh, immersing themselves in ordinariness and hoping some of it will rub off, concealing such snobbish stains as an Ivy League education, a family fortune or, worse, brains – dangerous brains. But even though the campaign process and the business of governance mean meeting and mimicking the people, politicians still constitute an elite. To come within sniffing distance of public office, candidates require stacks of cash, bundles of donations. It’s a sham to pretend otherwise, to keep staging this bumpkin burlesque and conducting elections as if everyone were running for Saltiest Salt of the Earth.
Conservative thinkers from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott have cautioned that the Enlightenment demand for new laws instead of old traditions leads to utopianism, revolutionary violence, and the dissolution of established community bonds. You might start with a bunch of great ideas and do badass things like take over churches and rename the months of the year (Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor!), but it all ends in tumbrels and Terror.
The so-called conservatives who have been in and out of power since the eighties are actually revolutionaries in this pejorative sense. Your Reagans, Thatchers, and Bushes have created regimes that are far more radical and utopian than those of their liberal coevals. Their dogma – market fundamentalism – is not to be confused with fiscal conservatism or enlightened support of the free market as a freedom that fosters other freedoms. Which brings us to …
Economic freedom, or the liberation of trade
Conservatives and their compatriots in the business community complain that intellectuals are anti-capitalist. They allege that nerds are socialist moochers or simply inept, congenitally incapable of effectively monetizing their ideas. But this ignores the stable of brains that the moneyed have bought and stored in a myriad of think tanks and foundations. These moneyed brains frequently plump for the Enlightenment in the same way that Glenn Beck flounces around in Founding Fathers drag. Regnery, one of the conservative movement’s publishing houses, pushes eighteenth-century classics, such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and The Federalist Papers, alongside its offerings from such contemporary bien-pensants as Michelle Malkin, Oliver North, and David Limbaugh, Rush’s duller brother.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment did indeed have a generally favourable view of business and free trade. Brisk trade was one of the things that Voltaire admired about England. In a letter from his exile in London, he writes, “Commerce, which has enriched English citizens, has helped to make them free, and this freedom in its turn has extended commerce, and that has made the greatness of the nation.”14 Merchants were certainly preferable to lazy, corrupt aristocrats.
Voltaire also sang the praises of the London Stock Exchange, one of the few places in Europe where Jews and Muslims and all the fractious factions of Christendom did business freely and peaceably. At the Exchange, “a more respectable place than many a court … you will see the representatives of all nations gathered together for the utility of men.”15
That bit about stock traders working for the utility of men might strike you as awfully quaint, but it’s important to highlight it, because it is another aspect of our Enlightenment heritage that has fallen into disrepair. Now we call our traders masters of the universe, not servants of the people.
David Hume called merchants the “most useful” of men. But for Hume, industry, knowledge, and humanity were inextricably linked. He thought that
[an] advantage of industry and of refinements in the mechanical arts is that they commonly produce some refinements in the liberal; nor can one be carried to perfection, without being accompanied, in some degree, with the other … We cannot reasonably expect, that a piece of woollen cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation which is ignorant of astronomy, or where ethics are neglected.16
This holistic vision of the relation between commerce and culture is one of the most important of the Enlightenment’s legacies, but it has been hijacked by market fundamentalists. They see commerce as an – arguably, the – end in itself. A piece of woollen cloth can be wrought by children or monkeys or robots for all they care, astronomy and ethics be damned.
The balance between culture and commerce is out of whack. We’ve lost sight of the thing that really is great about capitalism in our relentless pursuit of increased productivity and profit. We work ourselves into our graves, but Enlightenment thinkers embraced capitalism because increased efficiencies created more free time, which allowed people to pursue greater goals than merely subsisting and grovelling or getting and spending. Enlightenment thinkers were chuffed about the liberalization of trade and the first rumblings of the Industrial Revolution because they were optimistic that hours once devoted to manual drudgery could now be spent figuring out clever new ways to cheat nature and God, to break the curse of unrelenting shitwork with further industrialization and technology. This would mean less and less drudgery and more time for tinkering with the things that really matter in life, such as poetry, classical philosophy, political polemics, amateur experiments, wine collecting, and the free exchange of ideas. Which brings us to …
Freedom of the pen, or public discourse and a rambunctious press
I won’t linger on this topic too long either, as I will be looking at the press in detail in Chapter Six. But it is worth noting that the thinkers of the Enlightenment were fervent advocates of press freedom, and some, like those radical Frenchies Diderot and Voltaire, were martyred by censors and the police for writing smack about the Church a
nd the aristocracy.
Here again we see that these Enlightenment freedoms are inseparable. Free inquiry, free votes, and free markets require public forums that allow us to exercise our reason. Free discourse and lively disputes, dissent, and debate are necessary if we are to pursue truth, be it in the form of a scientific experiment, a satirical poem, or a political system. This is why Kant argues that freedom of the pen is one of the most important freedoms. He says that “freedom of the pen is the only safeguard of the rights of the people.” It also benefits the ruler, he argues, insofar as a ruler who stifles the opinions and complaints of the people “is thereby put into a self-stultifying position”17
England was the first country to allow a relatively free press, though one could still be prosecuted for libel and sedition. Enlightened despots such as Frederick II of Prussia also allowed more press freedom than their predecessors. The American Revolution was a pamphlet-fest, a flurry of polemics in partisan papers. And some states, such as Virginia and Massachusetts, already had clauses in their constitutions supporting freedom of the press.
There were bouts of backlash. Nevertheless, in spite of attempts to roll back press freedom, in Europe and North America the number of papers and publications, and the size of the literate public, grew by leaps and bounds throughout the eighteenth century. For example, the United Sates had only a handful of papers in the early 1700s, but more than three hundred by 1810.18
Now stories of the death of newspapers are ubiquitous, as everyone but the blue-hairs migrates from the antique broadsheet or tabloid to the electronic wilds of the Web, and papers die or cut entire departments such as book reviews or copy editing. Our press is suffering a slower, more ignoble demise than death by censorious tyrants. It is bleeding money and credibility, and its attempts to make more of the former mean liquidating more of the latter. The press tries to sell itself as an ally of the people, fighting for the common man, but polls show that the public does not believe this shtick. The media is not a forum for the free public exercise of reason, but simply another hated elite.
All four of these fields – religion, politics, markets, and the press – are rife with examples of the recrudescence of old authorities and traditions and a trivial sense of equality and liberty. The idea that your opinion, or my opinion, is just as good as anyone else’s casts away evidence and reason, which play important roles in Enlightenment thought. The empirical bent that we see in many Enlightenment thinkers is an attempt to ground opinions and ideas on facts and observable phenomena that every rational sentient person has access to, instead of just saying “God says,” “the King says,” or “because it’s always been this way.”
The thinkers of the Enlightenment were guardedly optimistic about human potential, as they were quite skeptical about whether we could learn to think for ourselves and shuck off the pernicious influence of alien guidance. This is why education is so essential. Education helps us develop opinions based on evidence and to better evaluate others’ opinions. It is also crucial in the development of common knowledge: a set of facts and standards we can all deploy in debates. This was the goal of one of the greatest Enlightenment projects, the French Encyclopédie. Diderot, the mastermind behind this project, said “All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard to anyone’s feelings.”19
Is this the case today? Sadly, no. A goodly chunk of media-speak and political rhetoric exists for the express purpose of provoking feelings rather than reasonable arguments about the facts. Then there are the forbidden facts, concealed in the interest of national and corporate security. Any number of examinations, debates, and investigations can never bubble up to the level of public attention lest they adversely affect some industry, leak strategically valuable information, spark litigation, or transgress one of our new articles of faith. And one of those new articles of faith, conveniently enough, is that we are the freest people in the world.
I saw an ad on TV not long ago that began and ended with the declaration “Free expression is what I’m all about,” a sentiment sure to meet with near-universal approval. But the product the ad was pushing was Botox, a poison that freezes your face into a stiff rictus that creepily approximates youth. Again – and in the most literal way – we see immaturity and consumption marketed as freedom.
It isn’t just that we are frittering away our freedom by succumbing to the parental charms of dogma and backsliding into alien guidance. North Americans have also chosen and created some really shitty, insipid dogmas. Hectoring demagogues run the gamut from ham-fisted literalist Christians and talk-radio yapflappers and marketeering mammonists to paranoiac 9/11 conspiracy theorists and condescending vegans. There is also the healthism that every gym and diet product and lifestyle pill consecrates, that every smoking ban and anti-trans-fat law enshrines, a nannying that thrives cheek by jowl with rampant unhealth and obesity. And then there’s the less sweaty version of this me-centricity and its twee New Age variants: the self-helpist narcissism that keeps the publishing industry alive.
The freedom that North American leaders extol is largely content-free, and duty-free too. Once in a while we have to pretend to remember the soldiers who died for it back in the day and send warm fuzzies to the ones dying for it now. Other than that, freedom-speak is a whole lotta “you can be whatever you want to be” hogwash, punctuated by orders to shop and to work.
We are not adults in the sense that Kant intended, but adolescents. This is a problem, because we are also the world’s most heavily armed teenagers. We have relentlessly extended the bounds of technical reason to the point that it has supplanted humane reason – the kind of thinking you find in history, literature, and philosophy. The problem is that technical reason is not Thought 2.0, an upgrade that replaces the buggy betas of ethics and history. Technical reason cannot replace humane reason. Rather, it demands great lashings of it. Comedian Patton Oswalt has a hilarious routine about a sixty-seven-year-old woman giving birth. At one point in his rant, he says that science is “all about the coulda, not the shoulda.”20 He’s right. We’ve augmented our coulda powers in fantastic ways, but our capacity for thinking about the shoulda has shrivelled. Enter Glenn Beck and Dr. Phil to fill the void.
Jefferson was adamant that an educated populace was necessary to maintain the republic, and he wrote about the need for public schools where everyone could learn to read, write, reason, do math, and study history, as these were the basic skills required for self-governance. Without education and general knowledge, the people were all too susceptible to flattery, fear-mongering, and demagoguery. In one of his many letters on this topic, he anticipates the bumper-sticker chestnut “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.21
In his final years, Jefferson made his ideas about education concrete, founding and designing the University of Virginia. It was one of the first schools in America to offer a political science program, and it had no faculty of theology or a campus chapel. Instead, the centre of Jefferson’s campus was the library, housed in a rotunda he modelled on the Parthenon.
It’s very picturesque and makes for a great photo op. Perhaps this is why, way back in 1989, when Bush the Elder called a meeting of the fifty U.S. governors to discuss national standards for the education system, they met at the University of Virginia. It may be difficult to remember this two decades later, after watching his son play the role of edjumacation prezdint, but Bush the First also pitched himself as an education president. Speaking from the steps of the Rotunda, he called for national performance indicators for schools and urged “tradition-shattering reform.” First on the agenda? “I see
the day when every student is literate,” quoth Poppy, shooting for the stars.
I have to give the man points for insisting that America must be a “reading nation,” even though he wrapped this fine principle in the usual blah-dee-blah about staying competitive in the international market. He omitted the salutary effects of reading that Jefferson endorsed, such as not becoming – or voting for – complete fuckwits, but he did ask the following excellent question:
Education is our most enduring legacy, vital to everything we are and can become. And come the next century – just ten years away – what will we be? Will we be children of the Enlightenment or its orphans?22
More than a decade later, in 2000, his son posed a similar question: “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” The difference between these two quotes says a lot, and none of it good. Even the president’s childrens is not learning. Is this because our schools is sucking?
Chapter Three
IS OUR SCHOOLS SUCKING?
And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know … the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country.